The afternoon’s snow was already turning to slush when Lizzy finally managed to escape the party.

Drunken carol singing and the clinking of glasses crept around the edges of the pub’s front door but the sounds were quickly chased away by icy wind. Lizzy zipped up her fleece, her breath clouding in front of her. It was a relief to be free of the suffocating merriment inside but she wished she’d grabbed a coat before sneaking out.

Hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jeans, Lizzy looked up and was startled to see her best friend, Nora sitting in the snow atop of one of the wooden tables in the pub’s courtyard.

‘Nora?’ A shiver ran up Lizzy’s spine, which had nothing to do with the cold night. ‘Is that you?’

‘Obviously.’ Nora jumped down from the table, her trainers making no noise on the snow covered flagstones. ‘Did you think I’d miss your mum’s Christmas party?’

‘Well… yes.’ Lizzy remembered the squeal of the car breaking too late, the black dress and smart, flat shoes shoved to the back of her wardrobe, the broken look on Nora’s mum’s face as the coffin was lowered into the ground. She shook the images out of her head. ‘You’re dead. You died months ago.’

It felt like one of them ought to mention it.

Nora rolled her eyes. ‘Like I’d let that keep me away.’

It was the eye roll that did it.

Lizzy rushed forward. Immediate, stinging tears blurred her vision.

‘It is you.’ Lizzy reached out but Nora moved away. Lizzy’s fingers closed on cold air.

‘Are we going for a walk?’ Nora asked. She forged ahead into the open moorland without waiting for an answer.

Wet grass squelched beneath Lizzy’s feet, quickly soaking through the thin canvas of her trainers, but still she followed Nora, doing her best to keep up with her friend’s confident stride.

She didn’t understand how Nora could be here. She didn’t care. All that mattered was that her friend was back and that she didn’t let Nora out of her sight.

Nora looked exactly as she had the last time Lizzy had seen her. Her golden hair was pulled back in a low ponytail. She was wearing the same ripped jeans and oversized t-shirt, too cold for this late December night. When Nora turned to check that Lizzy was still following, she wore the same pink lipgloss smile Lizzy knew so well.

‘What?’ Nora asked when they had walked far enough away from the pub that the wind howled louder than the guests. ‘Why are you staring at me?’

‘I missed you so much.’ Lizzy’s words struggled to find their way out.

Nora shrugged. ‘Well, I’m here now,’ she said, as though she had just been away for a weekend, as though Lizzy was being silly.

‘But how?’ Lizzy asked.

Nora raised her hands high above her head. ‘It’s a Christmas miracle,’ she shouted up at the wide, starry sky. Lizzy laughed like she hadn’t in months. ‘Come on.’ The girls ran through the snow together.

Up ahead, the old engine house, where Lizzy and Nora had shared so many pasties and secrets, loomed against the skyline, but Nora didn’t head towards it as Lizzy expected. Instead, she veered off to the left, towards a wire fence that bordered an open mine shaft.

Lizzy stopped.

The ground over the mine shaft had collapsed years ago. Lizzy’s mum had always told her not to go near it but there wasn’t a child or teenager in the village who hadn’t leant over the fence to try to see the bottom, throwing stones and secrets into the dark pit.

Except Nora.

Nora had seen the mine shaft collapse. She had appeared on the local news, clutching her dad’s hand while he told the reporter what it had been like to watch the earth split open right in front of them. All Nora had ever said about it was that it had been scary. She had never gone near the mine shaft again.

Now, without hesitation, Nora climbed over the rusted wire fence.

‘What are you doing?’ Lizzy asked, reaching out to pull Nora back, away from the great hole.

Something stopped her hand before she could touch Nora’s pale, bare arm. It wasn’t Nora moving away that stopped her this time but a feeling, a prickling on the back of Lizzy’s neck, which told her to run back to the pub full of people and lock the doors behind her.

Lizzy gripped the fence next to Nora.

‘It’s fine.’ Nora held out a hand to Lizzy. ‘Come on.’

All their lives, Lizzy had followed Nora. She had almost followed her into the road that day in June.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when she couldn’t sleep for the ache in her chest and the memories in her head, she almost wished she had.

Now, she looked down at the dark, vast hole in the earth. The wire fence dug into the flesh of her palms.

When Lizzy looked back up, Nora’s smile was so bright that her teeth seemed to glow in the moonlight, and so what if that smile was a little wider than usual, if she could see a few more teeth? It was Nora. Her best friend back from the dead. 

A Christmas miracle.

Lizzy reached for Nora’s hand, just like she always did. At last, their fingers made contact, Nora’s icy hand wrapping comfortingly around Lizzy’s, soothing the stabbing ache from where she had gripped the fence so tightly.

‘Lizzy?’ a voice called, somewhere far away.

Nora’s smile turned into a frown. Lizzy tried to turn around, to see who was calling her, but Nora pulled her forward, slamming her body into the fence. The old wire dug in painfully, straining against her torso.

‘Come with me,’ Nora said but it didn’t sound like Nora’s voice at all anymore.

‘Lizzy?’ the far away voice called again. ‘Is that you?’

Lizzy tried to pull back her hand but Nora’s grip was too strong.

‘Let go.’ The fence rattled between them as Lizzy struggled to free herself from Nora’s hold. Her foot slipped on the snow-sodden grass. She grabbed the fence with her free hand and cried out as the wire ripped the skin on her palm. Feeling the stinging, warm rush of blood on her cold hand, Lizzy let go of the fence, eyes drawn to the cut.

Nora finally let go of her.

As Lizzy fell, Nora’s face above her disappeared, replaced first by an angry, dark shadow, and then, as Lizzy’s back hit the cold, wet ground, by nothing at all.

Hands grabbed Lizzy’s shoulders. She flinched away but whoever the hands belonged to, they were insistent. They pulled her up, out of the snow, and bundled her into a coat. They cradled her cut hand.

Someone was talking but Lizzy wasn’t listening. She couldn’t look away from where Nora no longer was.

She had let Nora out of her sight and now she was gone.

She had let her go again.

It wasn’t until the person who had pulled her up moved, blocking Lizzy’s view of the mine shaft, that she realised it was her friend, Hannah.

‘What are you doing?’ Hannah asked, as she buttoned Lizzy into her own pale pink duffel coat. ‘You’re freezing.’ Hannah was shivering, in only a knitted dress and sparkly tights. Lizzy realised she was shivering too. ‘And what happened to your hand?’ Hannah demanded. Now that she had got Lizzy successfully into her coat, Hannah rubbed her hands up and down her own arms.

Lizzy looked again at the jagged cut on her palm. She curled her fingers into a fist around the blood. ‘I cut it on the fence,’ she said, hoping Hannah wouldn’t ask why she had been holding on to the fence in the first place.

‘Well, I hope you’ve had a tetanus shot.’ Hannah hooked her arm around Lizzy’s elbow and turned them both away from the mine shaft, to face the soft, golden light of the pub in the distance.

The pub was further away than Lizzy expected. She hadn’t realised she had walked so far.

‘What are you even doing out here?’ Hannah asked.

‘I was going for a walk,’ Lizzy answered. She remembered that but she wasn’t sure why she had walked to the mine shaft. That was a silly thing to do at night.

Lizzy tried to remember anything from the last few minutes but it was all fuzzy and just out of reach, as though she was trying to remember something that had happened years ago.

‘Without a coat, in December?’ Hannah asked. ‘Is the party that bad?’

‘Yes.’ Lizzy curled towards the warmth of Hannah’s body. Hannah extricated her arm and wrapped it around Lizzy’s shoulders instead.

‘Well, I’m here now,’ Hannah said. Lizzy had a strange feeling she had heard that before this evening, though she couldn’t think where. ‘We’ll sort your hand and then we can sneak upstairs and have our own party. Like we used to do with Nora,’ she added, her voice softening at the mention of their friend. ‘How does that sound?’

Lizzy nodded. ‘That sounds nice.’ They could remember Nora together.

It might almost feel like she was there with them.

This beach hasn’t changed – it’s the same slim strip of coarse-grained, pinkish sand in a black rock cove as curved as an eye. There’s something about the sound of the waves, the crumbling clay cliffs. Voices carry on the wind, a blur of words from the coast path above. Ponies graze the cliff meadows amongst the bracken and bee orchids. 

I wouldn’t say that I come here to think – quite the opposite. Here, things are simpler. Here, perhaps, I could slip off this false carapace and canter off, crabwise, to the waves. Here, like the sand, I take only what I am given. On the tideline, the familiar tell, a colour tender as baby flesh. On my knees I sift and scoop, picking out tiny cowries, their curving shells the pale pink of a summer dawn as the hot hand of the sun presses down on my back.

Further up the beach, I’ve left the pile of bags I carried here. Red rifts stripe my palms from carrying their awkward weight over rocks and sand. It’s all in the bags, what I owe you, what I stole from you and have hidden for so long. I’m no better than my aunt, twisting the rings from her dead mother’s fingers, hiding them away from her siblings, those bands of dark old gold set with a galaxy of rubies, sapphires and diamonds. Rings which I coveted. Rings that also were taken from me. 

I turn from my sifting and lean back on the bags. It’s uncomfortable, resting on a nest of jutting points which dig into my skin. Out in the bay, a seal breaks the surface and sea water pours silkily from its face. Grebes and divers dip beneath the waves and reemerge some distance away. The sea’s surface is oily in the heat, viscous as it pours over the black tips of reef-like rocks. The haunted summer wind brushes the exposed rocks of the littoral. Closed sea anemones cluster on the rocks, wet and red.

If anyone can do it, you will find me here. This beach is the place I’ve chosen for a reckoning with you. Even now you may have begun picking your way over the rocks from Carne. You probably think I’ll give them back to you, but these you won’t have. No one will – that’s why I’m here.

Until a week ago, I hadn’t been inside my father’s house for fifteen years. I knew that he was dying. I clean the doctor’s surgery; it’s one of many places I work. I’m a shadow, slipping in and out of view before the day arrives. I read his file, saw the many illnesses held in his body like cards pulled from a stacked deck, a royal flush, and so I started watching his house again, early and late. 

I live in a wind-soaked former holiday chalet on the cliffs. When the trees are bare, I can glimpse the glittering turrets of my father’s creekside home in the valley, watch his lights going on and off in the day-time and by night. As the end approached they flickered rapidly, a lighthouse flash of danger and distress. I felt as brimful as a cream-coloured sky before a snowfall. Finally, I smelt the possibility of victory – as if, for all these years, all that had been needed was the right combination of atmospheric pressure, a cold easterly meeting a warm storm wind from the west.

In this world, there’s so much muck and dirt to be dislodged. Every day I clean and sweep and the next day there it is again, an endless rain of dirt and dead skin cells. I drive to the accompanying rattle of buckets and mops in the back of my chewed-up Nissan Micra, my Henry hoover riding shotgun in the passenger seat, and a basket of disinfectant, cloths and window cleaner in the footwell. 

That morning, I parked a little way up the road and took the old path through the woods. Along the silted creekside, I walked beneath a richness of August blackberries and dark-leaved elder. During my visits, I’d worn a groove on the black earth, a furrow made by an animal trying to return to its fold. Clouds mustered above me, all dreamy shades of bruise and smoke. I sniffed the wind, warm and rain-laden, and felt it lift my hair. The lights in my father’s house. Off and on. Off and then, as the clouds darkened, a river of light flowed from the top floor to the front door. An ambulance rumbled up over potholes and parked under the portico, yellow and waddly as a bath duck, splashed by the mud of the lane. Puddy opened the door to let in two muscly, green uniformed paramedics, my grandmother’s rings aglitter on her fingers. 

A gurney. A bluebell-coloured vinyl medical glove dropped on the dim gravel of the drive. A blanket, cherry red, over the prone figure of my father. An oxygen tank. His blanched face, beneath the straps of the mask. Off they went. Puddy stood for a moment, stunned but jerking slightly, as if tazered. She went back inside. Keys, bag, coat. Minutes later, her nifty silver Mercedes A type departed, and it began to rain.

I was up for breaking a window. I was up for anything, but the door opened to my touch and I stepped onto the familiar floor of brick-red and lava-grey encaustic tiles. Puddy’s dogs, a mother and daughter pair of black Labradors, roused themselves. We knew each other well, having had many encounters in the woods. I pulled their favourite treats from my smock pockets and let them lick my hands. 

On the wall above the limestone mantel carved with a running wave was the painting I had come for, an impasto field of off-whites and blurry creams, its sister piece sold to the Tate for over a million last year. Despite its heavy look, it was light in my arms after I untethered it from the wall.  

While searching for large bin bags in which to stash my loot, I found the little room under the stairs next to the same old wretched loo Puddy had done little to improve. In what used to be the butler’s pantry was a recently vacated single bed and a bedside table covered by a thicket of pill bottles. This was where the old beast had ended up, then, in a damp, dark hole, with bars on its ivy-covered window. 

Oh, but on the dismal walls such treasure hung. Small, square paintings not much wider than a large man’s hand span which glittered like icons in smoky Byzantine churches. Each contained an image you could tumble into headfirst. My favourite showed bands of colour – beaten silver, taupe, aubergine – laid inside each other, becoming smaller and smaller until they disappeared to a vanishing point, a shimmering hallway down which a soul could pass before melting into the lamp black silence at its centre. 

I saw at once what they were: his songs of praise, his secret chords. His mitigation lest he face divine judgement for his faithlessness. The terror of death, of all he wrongs he’d committed, was written in these blazing squares. I took all of them. Every single one. If he ever returns to this place, he’ll find his sanctum sanctorum empty. A drawing board, a desk, a plans chest, a creaking floorboard beneath damp Axminster. By his sketchpad, a stick of charcoal. I picked it up and wrote God hates you on the wall.

Doctor Seth knows of our connection, and she’s always been kind to me. When Mum died, she got me counselling and helped me sort myself out. Sick note after sick note for a while, but the doctor never got fed up with me. She understood when I told her I was going away. ‘But you’ll come back,’ she said. ‘This is your home, too.’ 

When she gave me the job, she said nothing more than the usual about confidentiality. She’s the only one who ever speaks to me about my mother, who even seems to remember her. Doctor Seth smells nice, like vanilla and sea salt mixed together and warmed up slightly. Towards the end, my mother had a kind of chemical tang about her, a smell which disappeared briefly each time they pulled her from the sea.

Lots of people go crazy, but they lose their minds in different ways. My mother peeled potatoes until peelings were all that remained. She left doors and windows open in all weathers, asked if I could hear the buzzing from the underground cables carrying messages beneath the waves to America. The radar discs were tracking her, scanning secrets from the grey, damp forests of her brain. She went shopping and came back days later. Wet. Every time, wet through, and it hadn’t always been raining. And the reason for it never occurred to me, quite honestly. I was thirteen. And thirteen-year-olds notice everything, but they can’t always fit the pieces together. No-one said, Your mother is ill. In and out of the water. In and out of hospital. Always released to try again, relentless as the waves.

When my mother died, my father and Puddy wouldn’t take me in, because Puddy had given birth to you by then. I went from place to place.  When the system released me, I moved to this chalet. Last winter, something shook loose, and I opened the old boxes containing my mother’s papers. Child support payments never made. Rent arrears, last notice electricity and gas bills. All those years of struggle, and my father never gave us a penny. He employed every deceit imaginable, an arrow shower of lies from my family of thieves.

What a shame there’s no money in art. The house with the turrets, glittering in the valley, was in Puddy’s name. The rest – millions, probably – is untouchable, hidden away in some trust. Gleaming gold and gems on the soft skin of Puddy’s fingers. Waiting, watching. Puddy and my father. Ink-black darkness pouring through me each time I saw them hand in hand in the village or on the moss path to St Wyllow.

When my mother was a girl, the locals dumped their rubbish on this beach. The tide came up and carried it away. Traces remain at low water and after winter storms – odd, rusted coils of bedsprings, bucket-shaped lumps of concrete. Amongst it, tiny basslings hide in purple shadows.

I started collecting driftwood in spring. There’s quite a pile, now. Logs, timber, broken pallets. Brushwood from the cliffs. The sea’s refuse. All summer I’ve been planning today’s great blaze. You’ll see the light, the smoke, despite the glare of the setting sun.  

The big painting of the white field from above my father’s fireplace is the first to go. On this beach where, for the last time, my mother walked into the water, I place it on the pyre. The others follow, khaki and zinc, slashes of lamp black, crimson screams.

It’s the final piece that troubles me, the first painting I saw in the little room under the stairs of a beautiful hallway leading to an inner blackness. At the centre of the marble-clad temples in Greece and Rome there was always a room for the god to inhabit, a circular space full of darkness, entirely enclosed. No windows. No doors. The most sacred place in the building was lightless and empty, a sealed centre containing nothing. 

Cooler air moves over the sea, raising a light fog which dims the sun’s intensity. For a second, the air turns the peculiar, grainy black of eclipse light, and in this strange moment the painting opens its arms to me. It tells me my father was sorry. From its surface rises some bitter scent I recognise, preservative as salt, metallic as the lead-lined coffins of the contaminated dead.

No mercy. I hurl it on top of the pyre and grab the container of petrol the farmer has chained to the rock next to his boat and lobster pots. The currents in this bay are known for dragging the litter away, casting them off into the depths, never to be seen again. My mother remembered eventually. A fitting place for local trash. 

Over the sea, a violet sky. A half-moon ghosts the upper cliff. Amongst the dark blocks of container ships, a blaze of lemon horizon. Time for me to light my beacon. Last sun on the white sands of Carne, the hotel guests in their robes dissolving into silver mirages. A beach of small, safe waves. You white-blond and brown-shouldered; the gulls and the campion nodding. The verdancy of gorse, remedy for the broken-hearted. 

It’s falling back to earth now, water vapour that’s spent all day rising up into the blue. The matches are damp but the third one lights and tosses its bright head of flame high. I edge back. Such intensity already, huge, hurting sparks and cracks of splintering wood driving me seaward until my feet touch water. A huge bang as debris blasts everywhere and I turn and dive.

Slack tide. I made sure of that. I’m not ready for the currents to take me yet. I deserve one triumph in this pitiless life. I stole what I could never benefit by, had only power to destroy. Whose fault is that? It’s only paint and canvas after all. His legacy. Your inheritance. And mine. 

Perhaps you’ll come in time to douse the flames; you have that kind of golden air about you. Perhaps you’ll save the day somehow, the young knight errant that you are. Perhaps the flames themselves will refuse the dirty work I’ve given them to do, and, of their own accord, subside and die. I don’t care. I’ve made my point. Time to disappear. 

You were the only one who saw me. When you walked with them in the woods, tiny and unsure, my father on one side of you, Puddy on the other. One, two, three, weeeee! Up you swung. You were the one who paused, looked back, sensed the watcher in the shadows, and said nothing at all while they cooed like pigeons above your bright head. You peered out of your bedroom window on lilac-skied summer evenings, pulling back the curtain when you should have been asleep, opening the window wide. Your eyes searched the field at the edge of the woods, the drystone wall, the shivering branches of beech. You sensed me in the supermarket, the shapeless worker moving quickly out of your path, the shadowy figure wiping clean a pane of smudged glass. 

Friendship was your offer. The kindness I had never been shown. Restitution for the unfairness I’d suffered at the hands of your mother, our father. You wanted to see me, to get to know me, to try to make amends. This is my answer to you. I am not worth it. I stole from you to steal from them. I burned what I could never own, works of art which could only ever belong to you no matter what you said.

Neck deep. The current shifts again, a landward push. The tide’s rough hand, surging up the sand, into the coming dark. And I see you, torch in hand. You’ve always known what we both needed. You’ve waited for me as I’ve waited for you. I mistake the sharp prod to my chest for the thumping of my misshapen heart until I see my spirit painting– the glittering hallway and infinite centre – floating on the water. With a pulse the tide presses it to me as your hand wraps itself in mine.

‘Take a good look at yourself. Look what you’ve become.’ At the time I thought my mother’s words harsh, a spiteful outburst for no good reason. She’d steered me to the mirror in her small low-ceilinged bungalow, the early spring light beaming on glass, showing me exactly what she meant. It was an ugly sight.

‘‘You’re a divorcee not a zombie. You need a holiday,’ she’d added for good measure.

And so, I took one.

The looking glass definitely tricked me into picking it up. The last thing I expected to see while strolling on a Cornish beach was a mirror. A pool of light slap bang in the middle of the shingles. An alien landing pad bright and shiny. I snuck over to the object with the wariness of a crab. When I looked down it clouded over; my own face, framed in black ringlets of seaweed, peered back. It was a strange sight. My face, freckled with sand, a beached sea urchin.

We looked at each other for a short while. Me and my sandy alter-ego. I rubbed my eyes and yawned. Freckle-face winked. What! I widened my eyes; my mouth fell open in shock. My reflection smiled back at me. I touched my pulse. It was racing. I wasn’t dead.

This ‘other’ me, smug in the shingles, gave me another cheeky wink. When was the last time I had looked cheeky … or winked, for that matter? A trick of the light? I looked up at the sky and the sun was still shining. The earth, as far as I was aware, was still turning. Freckles was looking amused when I glanced back down. She raised an eyebrow.

‘So, are you ready for our See Voyage?’ she said in a voice which sounded like mine, but better; like it had been caressed by a warm sea breeze.

I looked around. A man was walking a dog by the edge of the water. Way out on the ocean was a liner. On the beach below was an oval of glass and a reflection of me waiting for an answer.

‘So how is this going to work?’ I replied. I was used to arguing the toss with myself. In an insane world talking to my better half in the reflection of a mirror on a pebbly beach didn’t seem unreasonable.

‘Like I said. We’re going on a See Voyage. We’re going to take that little red boat bobbing away in the shallows.’

‘What little red boat bobbing away in the shallows?’ I turned around. No little red boat, just a man and a dog walking west towards the lighthouse.

‘The red boat in the mirror. Behind me. Be careful when you pick me up … I’m fragile.’

I felt oddly reassured. This cocky ‘mirror me’ wasn’t all show. When I held it in my hand, I noticed a fine crack running down the right-hand side of the glass. Glass framed in mother of pearl, a pink and gauzy grey. I held it to my face, looked my reflection in the eye. Using my sleeve, I wiped away a covering of specks of sand and debris. Close up it looked older, the glass cloudy and mottled. Seaweed hair extensions stuck stubbornly to its slender frame. So, I left them there to swish in the breeze. There was something endearing about this little touch of vanity.

‘Shall we embark?’ My reflection said through pursed lips. ‘To the boat,’ she continued. ‘The one …’

‘I know, just behind you.’

‘Finishing my sentences now,’ Mirrorme said, with a superior smirk.

‘We have so much in common.’

‘And yet so little,’ smarty pants replied. I wondered if she could read my mind, as well as my face.

‘Hold me out in front of you and I will lead the way,’ she commanded.

This was easier said than done. The mirror’s perspective was deceptive, like the rear-view camera screens in cars. I tripped on the extended lead of a Highland terrier, I stubbed my foot on a rock, banged my shin on the side of the little red boat. It bobbed back in the water apologetically.

‘Everything looks so distant in the mirror. Not right in your face like in real life.’

‘Lesson One for the day,’ Mirrorme said.

‘You mean there are more lessons to be learnt before I wake up?’

‘Lesson Two. Reality is in the eye of the beholder. Let’s do history first.’

Perhaps I should have been afraid, with the sea lapping around my ankles, an ocean stretching to infinity. But I wasn’t. For the first time in a very long time the anticipation of doing something mad and potentially dangerous was exciting. I just wished I knew how to sail.

The boat was bobbing up and down expectantly. Mirrorme was fixing me with her glassy eye when I turned back to her.

‘You’ve done this before, remember? Shall I jog your memory?’ The mirror misted over for a second before revealing an old movie of myself on a small dart yacht. Must have been 20 years ago. We were holidaying in Sardinia, one of those all-inclusive family-friendly holiday

clubs, and I’d done a sailing course. I was good at it, I recalled. Sailing was all about tacking and balance. Working with the tides and the prevailing wind.

Placing the mirror on the wooden slat of a seat I pushed the boat out to sea and hopped on board. There was just enough wind to get some movement. The worst thing about any water sport, I remembered, was the static lulls. Today we had a balmy breeze; Mirrorme’s ringlets were fluttering like the sails. I propped her up against my rucksack and we sailed the waves in tandem. From the corner of my eye, I could see the sky reflected in the glass; the gulls swooping, a line of little clouds puffing above the ocean like steam from a train.

I moved from side to side on the boat, pulling at the sail ropes, steering our course over the waves. I had no idea where we were going.

“Well, this is nice,” I said after a while. A long while. And it really had been nice, with the sun and sea breeze on my face, sailing with a sense of purpose, but with no real destination.

When I looked back at Mirrorme I was surprised to see a trail of water running down the glass. Was she crying? Foolish thought. It was raining. First small splashes and then torrents. The weather in Cornwall can be bi-polar and the wind was whipping up the waves, making the boat rock violently. I grabbed the mirror as it jolted off its perch. Mirrorme was looking ahead towards the promenade in Penzance. Waves lashed the sea wall, froth gushing like geysers. In the mirror I could see grey shapes circling the boat. Fins. For Chrissake. Fins! Unlike me, Mirrorme was wearing a noble, brave expression. It could have been carved out of wood, a figurehead for the bow of an old ship.

‘Lesson Three,’ Mirrorme said.

‘What!’ I screamed over the howling wind.

‘Always look for a safe harbour in a storm.’

‘I learnt to tack in the Mediterranean not the Celtic Sea!’ I could see a light blinking to the east. The lighthouse? The light was pulsing in time with the high waves crashing against its stone turret, drenching it with foam. It didn’t look like a safe harbour, and I couldn’t steer the boat to it, regardless. In one hand I clutched the looking glass, in the other the sail ropes. I was clutching on to soggy strands of hope. And then I had a lighthouse moment. The mirror. There were still some faint rays of light piercing through the clouds. The clouds had grown, formed an aggressive gang, but light was still squeezing through. I held up the mirror, turning it in my hand, trying to recreate the SOS signal, spitting out water as the sea flung itself at me.

It all seemed pointless. I was going to die a horrible watery death because I had dared to dream. Dared to do one more reckless thing. The mirror and my raised arm were getting battered by the wind and rain. I let my arm fall to my side.

‘It’s raining men. Hallelujah. It’s raining men. Amen.’ Mirrome was singing. Her grainy little voice was singing. It was all right for her. She would float down to the bottom of the ocean to be picked up by adorable mermaids or be washed up in Hawaii … maybe. Me … I was shark snack. I was the bloated corpse found by wild swimmers in Sennen Cove.

I looked in the mirror. ‘What have you got to smile about?’

‘It’s raining men. Hallelujah,’ she sang back, as a school of dolphins leapt out of the ocean, pirouetting like backing dancers. ‘And you’re gonna get absolutely soaking wet.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I replied, cut off by a mouthful of sea water.

The dolphins were surrounding the boat. I’d read somewhere about how they steer people to safety. Had actually nudged a child to the shore. Just being by our side gave us some protection from the waves. I pulled at the ropes, steering us towards land.

‘Ahoy there. Ahoy there.’ Mirrorme was spouting off again. I was sitting on the mirror as both my hands were busy with the ropes.

‘Thanks,’ she said, as I budged over and lifted her up.

Her eyes were looking towards the harbour. I took the hint and started to flash the mirror again. In the distance I could see boats in the harbour, all safely moored but still taking a beating from the storm. To the west there was something moving on the sea. At first it looked like it might be an orange buoy which had been cast loose. But it was approaching fast, smashing over the waves. It was a RIB lifeboat.

‘Thank God. Thank God! I cried, hugging the mirror to me with one hand, still clutching the ropes with the other.

‘Thank yourself.’

‘And the dolphins,’ I replied.

‘Goes without saying.’

*****

An hour later I was sitting in The Dolphin pub in Penzance Harbour drinking cider. I’d already had a tot of rum on the lifeboat over. I’d brushed off all attempts to rush me to A&E and, once released from my foil wrapping, I was warming myself by a log-burning fire, wearing oversized fishermen’s joggers and a ‘I Heart Cornwall’ sweatshirt.

My rucksack had survived. So had the mirror which was stowed inside. The little red boat, which had slipped its mooring and floated to the beach, had been returned to the harbour. No questions asked. Thankfully.

‘It’s raining men.’ I couldn’t get the damn song out of my mind. But I couldn’t help noticing, The Dolphin was full of them. A pub on the corner of the harbour … hardly surprising that the local sailors and fishermen hung out there. My two rescuers were sitting at the table with me, laughing about my ‘trip’, the ‘foolhardiness of tourists’. ‘Hadn’t I checked the weather forecast?’ ‘Did I really think it was advisable to jump into a random boat and head off, on my own, out to sea?’

The guy probing me had the look of Paul Hollywood questioning a baker about their dubious plans for a Bake-Off Showstopper. He had the same flirty eyes. I figured he must have a tourist in every port. I was itching to get in my bag and check my look in the mirror. I’d used the looking glass earlier to fix my face before going into the pub. I was pleased to see the reflection looking back at me was reassuringly healthy. Cheeky, even. It winked back … but only at the same time as I winked. I tried a few quick moves, just to check this was my actual reflection. It was. Sadly, it was.

The stars were out as I strolled back to my hotel. We must have sat in the pub for two hours or more, the handsome sailor and me. Turns out he is also divorced, and a local carpenter who volunteers for the RNLI. A Cornishman. We’re meeting tomorrow evening for dinner. I’ll return his clothes then. But, tonight, I’ll return another gift.

*****

The gang of clouds which had bullied me on the boat were nowhere in sight. Instead, a full moon blazed in the night sky, illuminating the calm sea so it shone like sheet glass. I walked down the rugged rock steps onto the beach, where I’d picked up the looking glass that afternoon. There were a few people out walking, even at that late hour.

I sat there for some time, just watching the waves rolling in and rolling out. The looking glass was propped up against my rucksack and every now and then I glanced over to check if Mirrorme was there. But no. The only things reflected in the glass were the moon and stars and sea birds flying home to roost.

It must have been midnight when I rose to leave. I placed the glass on the sand, circling it with seashells and draping the frame with strands of seaweed. I took one last look in the mirror. A good look. It was a beautiful sight.

‘They say no one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space.’ 

The kneeling Transient’s voice tremored, betraying his desperation. Karim didn’t look at him. Neither did he look at his fellow warder but knew there would be a sneering smirk of delight lurking behind an assumed veneer of compassion. He’d seen it seven times before. Witnessed Bonnar’s insistence on this ridiculous, pointless ritual designed to drag out the inevitable suffering. Karim hated the squirming sensation his bowels made when, before, he’d watched the alternating flashes of terror and hope cross inmates’ faces. He’d learned to look away, to look at a point just above their heads, to study the deep space sky outside, with its flickering remnants of beginnings and endings. He’d learned to keep his gaze at such a discrete angle Bonnar would never guess he wasn’t watching. Karim knew what would happen if Bonnar even suspected he was giving in to any kind of lily-livered response. But still, the whimper in the inmate’s voice reminded him of the times when he had watched and found himself almost admiring Bonnar’s tremendous sense of sadistic timing. 

‘Close, but no cigar. Time’s ticking.’ Bonnar trilled the last word. Tiiii…kiiing.

‘Please, forgive me. I had so little time to spend in the Archives. Work, family, I barely had time to sleep some days. And the Archives are so vast.’ 

‘You know what they say, knowledge is currency. Trust me, it’s a well-known…’ Bonnar snapped his fingers in Karim’s direction. ‘What’s the word I’m wanting here?’ 

‘Aphorism?’ Karim offered. 

‘Exactly. It’s a well-known one of those. And the quote is, like, well famous. From one of the great William Shakespeare’s most famous movies.’ 

Karim closed his eyes for a nano-second longer than a blink, desperate to shut out the staggering depth of Bonnar’s ignorance. If knowledge was currency, Bonnar was bankrupt. His gaze returned to the spot just above the inmate’s freshly shaven head, with its nicks from a too sharp razor and its Cho Ku Rei tattoo, the latter a power symbol believed to help its wearer face great challenges. Karim didn’t need to ask what this man’s challenge had been. He could guess. 

The Transient’s eyes darted left to right, up and down, as if their searching might reveal the answer to Bonnar’s question, written on the gleaming titanium inner walls of the airlock. His tongue flicked, trying to moisten lips that were so dry they stuck together. 

‘In space…’ 

‘That’s good. Keep it coming.’ 

The Transient’s breath came quicker, his bony chest rising and falling beneath the thin, torn calico shirt. 

‘In space, they say, no one can hear a scream.’ 

‘Nearly there! Nearly there!’ 

Bonnar’s huge frame bounced up and down in an almost childish delight, but at the same time, one meaty hand moved closer to the console left of the outer airlock door. He knew the answer would be in the Archive. It wasn’t his fault if the Transient had been too lazy to learn. 

The Archive had been created to give Transients a genuine opportunity to progress. It had instantaneous translation into every known language in existence, the highest-grade search facility yet developed, and a phenomenal bank of subject matter updated on an hourly basis. The goal had been to enable every Transient to become a valued, equal member of society. It had taken generations to finally accept there was never going to be a Final Solution to put an end to the perpetual global migration; to stem the insistent drive to find a better life. A radical new vision was needed. For too long, people had been economically segregated, categorised in terms of consumer groups, with Transients at the bottom of the heap, particularly those considered to be illegals. They’d been labelled parasites, outcasts punished by a cat’s cradle of bureaucratic legislation preventing them becoming valuable, contributing members of their chosen society, all in the vain hope this would, in some magical way, discourage the people trade by undermining the business model of the traffickers. Years wasted in the fruitless pursuit of genuine human progress based on profit and loss accounts. Years wasted in the dehumanising belief that every problem could be solved if enough money was thrown at it, a facile attempt by the ruling elite to be seen to tackle a human crisis. Those who devised the Vision had seen past the blinkered, mercenary relationships that had come to dominate all areas of existence. The aim of the Vision was to move forward to a world where compassion, empathy, and the value of all human knowledge were placed on a pedestal adjacent and equal to profit. Environmental, social and governance departments were no longer poor governing bedfellows, but guiding lights. It was to meet corporate ESG requirements that had led to the development of the deep space stations, new worlds devoted to promoting the well-being of Transients. In the beginning there had been fertile opposition. It was argued the Stations replicated the lunatic asylums of the 19th century, which had only further undermined well-being by creating a trapped and institutionalised populace. Others saw it as a back door attempt to reprise the creation of brave new worlds that, in reality, were nothing more than penal colonies. But early fears had proved to be unfounded. The Stations had seen Transients receive the input they needed to genuinely progress. To go on to the safer, better lives they had craved. If they were prepared to learn. 

Yes, knowledge is currency, mused Karim, but what happened to those who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, learn. Or share that learning. 

‘Okay, last chance.’ Bonnar was in his element. He’d grasped the gist of allowing all to progress through the Elevation of Knowledge, but somehow the ethos behind it – and the compassion – had completely eluded him. 

Karim heard the Transient start muttering and then emit a guttural sound more animal than human. Against his better instincts, he glanced down. 

The Transient’s hands were locked together in a gesture of prayer. Was that instinctive? Genetic memory? It was certainly no longer taught. Hadn’t been since the Vision was implemented. The man’s lips trembled, his head shaking from side to side, eyes locked on Bonnar. 

Despite himself, Karim began to will the man to give Bonnar the right answer. He pictured the words travelling across space from his mind to the Transient’s. He saw large black letters penetrate the airlock door and swirl around the Transient’s head. 

Look around you, Karim exhorted silently. See the words. In your mind’s eye. See them. 

The Transient tore his gaze from Bonnar and looked toward Karim. His babbling stopped. His lips began to move purposefully. 

‘In space…’ he began, ‘In space, no one can hear you…’ 

Bonnar slammed his fist against the console. The outer airlock door flew open, and the Transient was gone. 

‘Did you hear that? On the comms?’ Bonnar beamed triumphantly. ‘I swear he screamed. Right as the airlock opened. Did you hear it? I heard it. Swear I did. Right, my friend, I think we’ve earned ourselves a right royal breakfast.’ Bonnar turned sharply on his heel and headed for the linking corridor that led to his breakfast. After a guilt-tinged glance at the airlock that had just ejected Transient Vasily 03, Karim followed.

All the eating facilities on the Station were excellent–progress marches on its stomach—and the one thing Karim and Bonnar agreed upon was that the canteen on D deck was without doubt the best. The head chef, Mo, a Transient woman in her 80s originally from the Far-Lands, had been a total knowledge freak most of her life, and catering excellence had followed. There was always a theme, usually a celebration with a dark or humorous twist, built around historical events found on the Archive. 

Today was no exception. 

A banner hung from the ceiling with the tongue-in-cheek declaration: EARTH: REFERENDUM VOTES TO LEAVE SOLAR SYSTEM. Menus graced the tables, laid out like news reports referencing the beginning of the Great Break Up and the Third War to End All Wars. Karim got the reference, smiled, and silently applauded the irony. The joke, like the banner, went over Bonnar’s head. 

‘What’s good today?’ 

‘All is good.’ Mo was sensitive to any suggestion her food was ever anything other than top notch. She was a Transient who’d decided to progress as far as she could. She had found her new life and took pride in it.

‘He means what’s special.’ 

Karim winked gently at Mo as he spoke. He’d always had a way of diffusing tension, of pouring oil on troubled waters. Once, his way of keeping the peace had helped in the Mid-Lands, but the Third War to End All Wars had changed everything and now, on the Station, it was seen as unnecessary. Nothing seriously interrupted the peace, so there was no need for peacekeepers. It had taken a long time for Karim to adjust. By the time he progressed to the status of Warder, a cushy number given the lack of any meaningful conflict, he had gained much knowledge but had struggled to find his identity in this new world. Six months working with Bonnar had done the rest. After fourteen months on Deep Space Station Kappa, Karim felt emasculated. 

‘Then he should say that. Special? The mushrooms. A medley. Three varieties. Fresh picked. Tomatoes. Silken tofu. Seeded bread straight from the oven. Heaven on a plate. And nothing needed to die in the process.’ 

Karim squirmed as the face of the Transient in the airlock pushed its unwelcome way into his mind. 

‘I eat what I want. Alive or dead. I’m not squeamish.’ 

Mo regarded Bonnar with contempt. 

‘That’s because you were never a Transient. You wear your privilege like a close-fitting coat. What can I get you, my friend?’ Mo’s face softened as she looked at the younger man whom she had seen progress so well, though not necessarily in a direction she approved of. 

Karim’s stomach churned at the thought of food, even food as good as Mo’s, but he was too polite to say. 

‘Mushrooms sound great.’ 

‘I’ll have the works.’ Bonnar grunted. 

‘Of course you will.’ 

Mo left the sarcasm hanging in the air, turned on her heel, and headed back to the sanctuary of her kitchen. Bonnar gave her back a sour look. 

‘These Transients are getting above themselves if you ask me.’ 

It never ceased to amaze Karim how Bonnar would talk about Transients as if Karim wasn’t one of them. At first, he thought it was a sign of acceptance and felt reassured. Later though he came to frame it as a refusal to acknowledge him on any significant level at all, unless Bonnar needed a whipping boy. But they’d never discussed it because Bonnar never mentioned it and Karim never brought it up. He just assumed it was likely the latter in the same way as he assumed his progress would continue if he kept up his visits to the Archive, logging his hours like deep sea divers log their time at depth. 

‘Cat got your tongue?’ At the table, Bonnar was starting in on him, out of boredom perhaps, or to release some pent-up tension, but before Karim could answer, a plate of food was waved in front of their faces. 

‘Mushrooms?’ 

‘Mine.’ said Karim, sitting back in his chair as a second plate descended swiftly and landed neatly in front of Bonnar. The server gave a theatrical flourish, like a magician might after successfully tricking a member of the audience, then lent forward, floppy fringe falling across her face, an impish look dancing behind her mock serious expression.

‘Cat got your tongue! Did you know that saying goes back over 5000 years? The ancient Egyptians liked to cut out the tongues of blasphemers and feed them to their cats. Cats were worshipped in Egypt. Did you know cats don’t have a sweet tooth and a cat’s hairball is called a bezoar? They usually vomit these up, but there are any number of methods to help a cat rid themselves of a hairball. I love cats and there is just so much information about them in the Archives. Do you have a cat? Having a pet can be very therapeutic for your health. A number of medical research trials show that patients in terminal care medical facilities reported far less pain when they had an animal to pet. Particularly a cat. Before I became a Transient—I was still only seven years old—I would visit my grandmother who had a dozen cats. I read of an old lady once who had dozens of cats and when she died, they fed on her body. I learned on the Archive that it was their way of showing love and saying goodbye. Isn’t that lovely? Things to consider: do cats really have nine lives, is curiosity lethal, and can cats really be alive and dead at the same time? According to one 20th century physicist, that is entirely possible. Enjoy your meal.’ 

Karim smiled inside at the outpouring of acquired knowledge. Once, he’d had to work that hard at the Archives. Now he didn’t need to, and he was grateful. He still kept up his hours, logging them diligently, but he’d achieved. He could relax. A little.

The young server left, but before either Karim or Bonnar could raise fork to mouth, the internal comms systems coughed into life: 

‘T Vasily 03. Log in please.’ 

Karim frowned and looked at Bonnar, who barely hesitated before plunging his knife and fork into his eggs. 

‘Did you hear that?’.

Bonner didn’t stop chewing. ‘Eat your breakfast.’ 

‘The Transient we just … processed. The system just called for him.’

‘So what? Eat up!’

Karim stared at his plate; an uncomfortable lump had formed in his throat. 

‘I’m not hungry.’ 

Bonnar lunged at Karim’s plate and loaded his fork with a healthy measure of his colleague’s mushrooms.

‘Relax. Come on. It’s just a job. Let it go. Eat your breakfast.’

‘But why did they order it?’ 

‘Why did they order what?’ 

‘Why did they order us to take them. To lose them. What makes them different? There have been eight now. Eight in as many days. Why? And why us?’ 

‘Why us? Well, as an old army captain of mine used to say: ours is not to reason why. He said it was good advice he’d received from a Transient who learned it through the Archives but, sadly, failed to act on it.’ Bonnar gave a slight snigger. ‘Anyway, I like to work on a need-to-know basis. And I don’t need to know more than I already told you and that was what they told me.’

‘Have they asked other warders to do the same?’ 

‘No one’s said anything.’ 

‘It just doesn’t fit with everything else they do. Don’t you ever ask yourself what’s changed?’ 

‘Nothing’s changed. They know what they’re doing.’

The comms system wheezed again. 

‘T Vasily 03. Log in please.’ 

Karim’s face paled, then reddened, betraying the fact that he was both unsettled at the insistence the deceased Transient should log in, and irritated by the fact they had on board all the wonders of early 23rd century technology, yet the intercom still sounded like an old man with a respiratory disease. But now the insistent croaking seemed to take on a sinister tone. He felt increasingly nervous.

‘But if they asked you, I mean, us, to see to it, why are they now asking him to log in? They never asked the others to log in after…you know. I mean why would they? They’ve processed hundreds, thousands of Transients. It’s always the same. The shuttle arrives. They’re deplaned. Processed. Then the learning begins. They start their new lives. End of. Then, out of the wide blue yonder, eight are brought to us, one after the other to…you know. And we do that, no questions asked and no follow up. Then this. They broadcast to the whole Station that they want’… Karim lowered his voice to a whisper … ‘a dead man to log in. It doesn’t make sense. What’s changed?’ 

‘What does it matter? And why do you care anyway?’ 

Karim’s throat tightened.

‘Because it could be me.’ 

‘How could it be you? You’re here. You’re a Warder enjoying your privileges. Like eating your breakfast.’

Bonnar’s cognitive processes were resolutely concrete.

’Okay then, it could be like family. Or a friend.’ 

Bonnar stopped chewing. 

‘You have friends who are Transients?’ 

‘Of course.’ 

‘Really? Why?’

The truth struck Karim like a stone: Bonnar doesn’t know. Is that possible? And if Bonnar doesn’t know, how would be react if he found out? From someone else. Would he think Karim had been deliberately holding out on him? And would he then suspect Karim might be holding out on other things. Maybe Bonnar would look at Karim a little more closely. With suspicion even. That was the last thing Karim wanted. His breath came faster. Should he tell, or not tell? As he sat there, his breakfast chilling on its plate, the Archive’s choices and voices churned round in his mind: I’m between a rock and a hard place. Scilla and Charybdis. The hammer and the anvil. The Devil and the deep blue sea. It’s a predicament. A bind. A dilemma. Hobson’s choice. A no-win…

‘Because I’m a Transient.’ Karim blurted it out.

Bonnar’s lower jaw dropped so fast and so low it would have seemed comical under other circumstances.

‘You are? 

Karim gave the merest of nods, his eyes never leaving Bonnar’s face.

‘Do they know?’  

‘Do they know what?’ Karim’s wary brow furrowed.

‘Do they know you’re a Transient?’

‘Of course they know. They placed me.’ 

‘They placed you with me?’ 

‘You know they did.’ 

‘Did they tell me?’ 

‘I don’t know. Did you ask?’ 

‘I already told you…’ 

‘Yes. Yours is not to reason why.’ Karim exhaled what was almost a breath of relief and disbelief. 

Then Bonnar threw his arms in the air, knife and fork still clutched in his pudgy fingers.

‘A Transient. They expected me to work with a Transient. Not a word or by your leave. How long were you going to hide it?’

‘I didn’t hide it. I thought you already knew.’

Red-faced, Bonnar looked like he was going to choke on his breakfast. He swallowed hard and was about to spit back a reply when the comms coughed into life again.

‘T Vasily 03, log in please.’

For a second Bonnar was distracted. Karim clutched at the opportunity.

‘So what do we do?’ I mean, do we tell them what’s happened? In case it’s a mistake, like an admin error.’ 

‘They don’t make mistakes.’ 

‘Everyone makes mistakes.’ 

‘Not them. They don’t. They don’t.’ 

Bonnar was now clenching his fists white-knuckled round his cutlery. Like many not blessed with the ability to articulate well, he expressed his inner conflict much more physically, like a child having a tantrum. Karim could see the tension building in the big man’s frame. His shoulders were hunched, his fingers clenching and unclenching. The heel of one foot was tapping repeatedly on the ceramic flooring. Bonnar was starting to draw attention to himself. So Karim did what he did best. He pacified.

‘No, you’re right. Of course. They don’t make mistakes. We probably misread the manifest sheet. Maybe it was T Vasily 01 in that airlock. Or 02. Forget it. Finish your breakfast. Do you want coffee? Maybe some juice? You relax and enjoy. I’ll be straight back.’ 

At the self-serve drinks counter, Karim pretended to stare at the options, thankful to be away from Bonnar’s rising fury. He would no doubt have to face the fallout from his revelation in the not-too-distant future, but what troubled him more was the repeated request that had come over the comms. In his mind, he replayed the morning and pictured the manifest. He would stake a month’s pay on it reading the name T Vasily 03 under the heading ‘For Transit’. 

When they had received their first Transit order, Bonnar, as a senior warder, had been told that the person to be moved on presented a severe risk to all those on DSS Kappa. But no explanation was given as to the nature of the risk. There were over 3000 people aboard the Station, so it was hard to envisage what risk one sole individual could pose. When they were presented with a second person the next day, Karim thought perhaps a pair of Transients had begun to share some poisonous discontent—there were always mumblings amongst some, usually about trivial matters that were swiftly dealt with in a sensitive, diplomatic manner, with a post-incident focus group discussion ensuring everything had been resolved to the satisfaction of all. Discontent rarely rumbled on for long. And even if it did, ejection would have been an extreme, and out of proportion response. A punishment, if that’s what it was, that did not fit a relatively minor infringement such as dissent. Had they refused to learn? Did that explain their exit? But the ethos decreed that given the right environment, all people would flourish. Daily affirmations received over the comms reinforced the value of working at individual, and therefore community, progress. Of valuing the distance travelled instead of despairing at the distance still to go. Of never giving up. None of that fit with the Transit orders of the past eight days. And T Vasily 03. 

Karim forced himself to picture the little man, seemingly inoffensive in every way. He’d never noticed him around the Station, but then, he’d not seemed the type who would stand out. Just an ordinary Joe. Except for the tattoo. The power symbol. That would have attracted attention if it hadn’t been hidden by his hair. So, had his head been shaved and the tattoo discovered? If so, what led to the shaving. Or were the authorities already alerted and the tattoo discovered afterwards? Maybe the tattoo was just a harmless adornment mistakenly perceived as … what? Karim didn’t know, and not knowing was a problem, a side effect of the thousands of hours put in at the Archive. Others had suffered it too. It was never the intention of the Vision, but not knowing was increasingly seen as a mark of shame. 

‘Kappa is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, used to represent the voiceless velar plosive.’ 

Karim started and turned toward the speaker. It was the same floppy fringed server who had brought their breakfast and regaled them with everything she knew about cats. Except this time her voice was hushed and her words pregnant with meaning. 

‘Kappa is Finnish for pelmet. Also, Kappa is a Japanese water spirit. Its form is that of a cross between human, duck, and turtle. Kappas live in ponds and rivers. They drag people in and drown them. If a Kappa gets hold of you it will pull your intestines out through your arsehole. I’ve no idea why it would do such a thing. But then, why was T Vasily 03 designated for Transit? Does it have something to do with the Quantum Experiments? I say it again: can a cat really be alive and dead at the same time? How many times must they test a theory before it becomes a fact? I recommend the passion juice. The fruit was picked from the farm on Deck H and freshly squeezed this morning.’ 

Then she was gone. 

For a full minute, Karim remained motionless, one hand lifting a cup to the fresh drinks machine. It was as if someone had been listening in on his thoughts, the intrusive ones that shouldered their way through the cognitive flotsam that had cluttered his mind since he was brought to the Station, assessed, and placed on the Archive programme. Was it all too good to be true? 

It had been his heart’s desire to escape to a safe place. He’d known the risks that came with trusting the traffickers. He’d taken the glorious promise of a golden future with a large pinch of salt but an even larger pitcher of hope. He’d seen how incomers had been treated in his own country. He’d witnessed how those who’d been incomers a generation before went on to look down on the new wave of the desperate and displaced. Instead of experiencing compassion born out of empathy, the new waves were treated with contempt. Those who had felt the same vulnerability, the same fragility, those who had once been in the very same situation, now clutched at a pitiful sense of superiority and were the first to complain about incomers. They had assimilated, aligned themselves with those who had welcomed them in, but then eaten from the tree of the lemon, spitting at those who came to line the streets to merely exist in detention centres and filthy hostels, waiting for their hope of a new life to be realised. 

There is a choice in life, Karim knew, between offering a helping hand or a down treading foot. There was also a third way. Karim had chosen that third way: to stay neutral. Throughout the journey from his home, across the vast stretches of barren landscapes and dried up waterways, he had kept himself to himself, promising that when he reached the safety he was seeking he would go back to being his old self: Karim with the smiling eyes. Karim of the kind word. Karim the peacekeeper. 

‘What’s the hold up?’ 

Bonnar’s growl jerked Karim back to the present. 

‘I was trying to decide. Passionfruit or elder.’

‘Neither.’ 

Bonnar reached for a coffee mug, knocking Karim to one side. 

‘You know your problem, Transient? You think too much.’ 

Karim couldn’t argue with that. He ignored Bonnar’s relish at the new-found way to acknowledge him and lifted a glass to the elderflower dispenser. He  watched as the light caught the pale, golden liquid as it flowed into his glass. It seemed to him it was almost the colour of the honey his grandmother had drizzled across her fresh baked bread back in the old country. Honey from the hives on their own land. A land lost years before. He knew this place would never be home, but it was a life. A life his family did not have. Karim choked back the sting of survivor’s guilt and set his jaw.  The past is past. This is now. The old Karim is not dead, but the new Karim is alive and well. Maybe ignorance is bliss, he thought. Maybe his was not to reason why. Maybe he should just be grateful he had survived. If those Transients had to be designated for annihilation, maybe there was a good reason for it. And if the system had made a mistake, well, it was beyond his pay grade to fret. 

Karim cradled his drink in both hands, rolling the cool glass back and forth over his fingers. As he sipped, then heartily gulped, he thought of the old country, and his heart felt almost at peace. Then the antiquated comms sputtered back into life, announcing with an almost imperceptible note of satisfaction:

‘T Vasily 03 has logged in.’

Four of them, sometimes five – a dog or a spoiled cousin. Their lives are exquisite yet they long to escape something unnameable that compels them to leave home on the first day of the holidays: it’s a scorcher say the boys, and Cook has packed a hamper. As if these are reasons enough for what follows.

The girls must leave a note with full directions and a map of the adventure, with the time Mother and Cook should expect them back. Just like girls to dally! 

Then off they trot, the boys and the girls plus cousin or dog, and after a jolly good slog it’s the girls who want to stop. Just like girls to nag!

So the boys find an island in the last of the light, or map the best way up a mountain before tea, or reach a clearing in the forest’s heart that waits for their knapsacks.

The boys now must plan how they’ll attack tomorrow, tell the girls to take charge of domestic arrangements so the boys can rest their clever heads. The girls make up beds from bracken – there’s always bracken – and moss, just the right amount, to make beds soft for sleeping. And their make-do home for the night? Let’s say it’s a handy cave with a floor of sand, but it could just as easily be a hollow tree, an abandoned rustic’s hut, a caravan of red and gold. The boys’ choice will always be the right one, and will always, somehow, be waiting for them just when they need it.

Wherever they are, the girls must sweep the place, their brooms fashioned from twigs left from the firewood supply which the girls gathered quietly, for they mustn’t chatter, the boys say, while the boys do the hard work of thinking. And so the girls sweep, and while sweeping they speak in language they have learned every day of their short lives: wordless, urgent.

Their thinking done, the boys light the fire so the girls can cook the boys’ supper. The flames catch as they never fail to for the boys who keep the matches from the girls. Just like girls to moan!

And the girls should be busy anyway – there’s supper to find! Born to find berries blindfolded in every wilderness, these girls, and now the boys are sleeping, and when the girls have washed and dried and put away the supper things, and washed and dried and darned the clothes, they agree: they need to leave.

They creep, these girls, to the back of the cave, to the roots of the tree, under the caravan, to the hut’s hidden attic, and dig up the knives buried while sweeping. The knives pressed on them by Mother, by Cook, by the women they passed on their way who worried. Just like girls to be afraid!

They retrieve the berries they gathered, the poisoned and the safe. They light torches of moss from the fire that must never burn out, never leave them in darkness. Then they’re off. They take the cousin or the dog, and sweep their prints as they go. Just like girls to scope the exits!

Before going to the pub, I take a quick stroll, to pluck up courage.  Turn along the lane out of the village, my smart shoes softly tap-tapping on the tarmac. A few early stars shine bright in the clear autumn sky and my stomach does somersaults. Internet dating? Me? I must be nuts. I nearly walk back to the farm, then and there.

I stride the grassy track leading uphill, dew speckling the ends of my trousers. My daughter’s words come to mind. Too old to pick and choose, she’d said. Try it. You’re not going to meet anyone new, milking those ruddy cows every day.

I sigh, catching a whiff of my freshly ironed shirt, all mixed in with the smell of bracken in the hedgerows. She’s right. I need a woman. Need a change. Need to get out the damn door, once in a while. Five years since my wife Morwenna died. All I’ve done in the meantime is run the farm. Dawn until sundown, five years straight. Going out for a meal with someone would be good for me.

I stop dead, at the stone. This seemed enormous to me when I was a child. It towers ten foot high – a rounded oblong shape that seems out of kilter with the moorland landscape around it.

Blisland Stone. Tourists call it the Jubilee Rock. We villagers simply know it as the Stone.

I run my work roughened hands over the lichen-bearded granite. The rock is covered with carvings, like tattoos on a fairground freak. Some are relatively recent: coats of arms from rich families at the turn of the century.

The Stone is older than that, though. In fact, it’s the most ancient piece of granite on Bodmin Moor. Some say it predates humankind.

I crouch at the back of the Stone, feeling down for the secret symbols half-hidden by long strands of grass. Here there are jagged lines, off-centre squares, oddly dotted circles. The information board they’ve put up says these could be runes, dating from Viking times.

I know better, or think I do. 

They’re ancient as the land itself, and they hold power.

I trace one with my finger, squinting in the half-light. Everything is greyed out, shaded to black and white, now that the sun’s rays have gone from the sky. I do what I always do, and run my hand backwards along the line, three times for luck. The lichen crackles into fragments under my fingers.

It’s done, and I’m ready for this bloody date now. I stride back downhill and the lights of the village draw me in like a moth to a bonfire.

A clear night.

And yet, as I walk downhill towards the houses, my skin prickles. A thick mist shrouds the pub. I blink. Sometimes we do get a convection fog up here, in the summer months. Everywhere else in Cornwall can be broad sunshine, and we get a strange white obscurity in the air of the high moors. 

But I’ve never seen it on a crisp autumnal evening. I smell a strange floral scent, but there are few blooms in the hedgerow this time of year. I close my eyes for a second, trying to place it. When I open them again, my vision flickers. Just briefly, as if the world itself has adjusted.

It isn’t mist. More like a visual thing. I blink, and feel in the pocket of my wax jacket to check for my glasses. I’m forty-two, and like to think I don’t need them. I’ll be lucky if any woman’ll want me.  

 

I stand at the door of the Blisland Inn and my heart races. John Hick, out on a date with a stranger. I breathe in deep, and push open the oak door.

 

She said in her email that she’d get there at seven o’clock sharp and go to the table by the window. Well, I’m never on time and I know it’s a bad start to any relationship, but I walk straight across the pub floor to the bar. I can’t do this without a pint of ale in my hand. My mouth waters. I don’t look left or right, but I hear a low hubbub of voices and the crackle of flames from the fire. There’s the smell of woodsmoke and the slate flagstones are smooth under my feet.

You’d think I’d want a date farther away from my own village, my own farm. Away from the prying eyes of neighbours. 

But no – I’m honest, always have been. If I’m dating, I’d rather do it in the open space of my local pub. Let people talk, if they must. I’ve been brought up with these men and women, and they’re all familiar faces.  

I don’t recognise the barmaid as being a local, but that doesn’t stop me ordering a pint of bitter and grasping the glass thankfully. My stomach churns with hunger after a day in the fields.

Hang on. That barmaid. She’s gorgeous.

She stares at me with beguiling green eyes which dance with reflections from the fire behind me. She’s unsmiling and yet her face is fine-featured. Her long fair hair is streaked with silver and I fancy for a moment there are strands of gold along her skin, caught in the wrinkles around her eyes. She wears dangly earrings: on one side is a tiny silver sun, on the other is a wide full moon. I smile, starstruck, and pass her a five pound note. As she spins around to work the till, I breathe out and my heart stumbles to a steady pace. I’d been holding my breath, but don’t know why. This barmaid, she’s not my type, and I’m not here for her, anyway.

Turning, I scan the room for someone sitting on their own. 

A dark-haired woman catches my eye, and waves. I nod, and walk over.

“You must be John,” she says, and I go to take a seat opposite her. 

“Eve, isn’t it?” I put down my pint, and it slops onto the varnished wood of the table. My hands are chattering with nerves and I pull them back onto my knees, stretching out my fingers to ease the tension.

“You nervous?” she asks, and her voice is the same relaxed tone as when she called me on the phone, the other night. Perhaps she thought I was going to stand her up, and she wanted to check the number worked. 

“A bit.” I nod, slowly. “It’s not my thing, this internet dating lark.”

“And I’m your first, aren’t I?” She smiles, and it’s genuine. She’s trying to put me at ease. “It’s nice to be someone’s first. Haven’t been one of those in a long time.”

I chuckle. “Done this before then, have you?”

“Not for a while.” A shadow shifts across her face. “I – I lost someone dear to me. In fact, I’ve lost a few.”

“My wife passed away five year to the day. Daughter signed me up to the website, said it’d do me good.” I smile apologetically and reach for my drink, then pause. “Dunno if I’m ready, but here I am.”

She nods, and tips her head sideways, listening. Her hair’s curly and it bounces on her shoulders. “You’re looking good though, John. I mean, smartly dressed and that.”

I shift in my seat. “Clean shirt, is all. Should’ve seen me when I come off the fields earlier. Live in my overalls most days. Covered in, well, you know. I’m a dairy farmer. Got a herd of a hundred, give or take. Keeps me busy enough.”

“If you’ve been out all day, you’ll need feeding.” She hands me a menu and I reach for it. My hand’s shaking, and she laughs. “Look at that! Shivery with hunger, you are.”

“Let’s see what we fancy.” I open the menu in front of me but the words swim in front of my eyes. I daren’t sip my pint; I’m feeling anxious enough as it is.

Instead, I look at her closely. It was the eyes and the hair that I liked, on her photo, and I still do. Reminded me of someone, from years back. Different from my wife’s red curls and freckled skin, and God knows I need different. 

I landed on this Eve, and I’m not so sure she was telling the truth about herself. Is she like her picture, or no?

I took my photo the day I posted it. Standing in the fields, feeling like a loon, with green fields and blue skies. Looking like the farmer I am. There’s wrinkles on my forehead from the hard winters, and my neck’s thick as a bullock. I wouldn’t win any races, but my forearms are muscled from driving tractors across icy rutted fields.

I thought her photo was an old one, taken when she was younger. I frown, trying to make out what’s clanging in my head like a warning bell. Something’s off. I’ve a gut feeling – like at the auction, when I’m being done over for an animal that’s advertised the wrong age.

“Quick question, Eve.” 

She looks up, eyes all innocent. As she holds the menu, I notice her silver Celtic rings, intricate and beautiful. Suddenly, I can visualise her in bed with me quick as a flash. She’d writhe around, her hair loose on my pillow. I’d hold her tight against my chest, and she’d smell great. 

“It’s silly, really. I just wondered…” 

“I’m not after your money, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I laugh. “No, it’s just…you’re…looking really good for your age. You’re the same age as me, you know?”

“And how do you know that so exactly, Mr Hick of a hundred cows?”

My laughter tails off. “Well…your age was on the site, see. And I’m forty-two as well.”

She frowns, as if trying to work something out. “Really?”

“Yup. And… you look bloody amazing for forty-two.”

She frowns again, then chuckles. “Honestly. If I was going to lie about my age, I’d have gone the other way, you daft bugger. Pretended to be twenty-one or something.” She puts the menu down. “What’s good here?” she asks.

“Haven’t been here in years, to be honest. But food’s always good.” I close my menu, running my hands over the black smooth cover. “I’ve chosen.”

“And?”

“Steak and ale pie.” I nod toward the bar, gesturing for the barmaid to come and take our order.

“Oh, don’t rush me.” She sips of wine. “I’m making the most of this. My night out. What about the pheasant in red wine?”

“I’ve a herd of cattle, remember? Always recommend the beef, in any form.”

“That’s it, then.” She flashes me a contrary look, and I warm to her. “I’m going for the pheasant, John. I like the wildness of it.”

“Not wild enough though, are they? Farmed down in the valleys, penned and fed up… then let loose to be shot by the posho’s one weekend a year.”

“Can’t put me off.” She unwraps her knife and fork, and they shine against the varnished wood of the table. 

The barmaid’s come for our order and I glance at her. She watches me with her icy green eyes and I can’t look away. Something’s certainly in the air tonight, something special. My blood’s rising. I’m getting so as I want to hold someone tight, and yet I’ve got to play this dating game all evening.

I lean against the hard oak back of my chair. “Steak and ale pie for me, and the pheasant for this young lady.”

“Less of the young, please. I sound like your daughter or something.”

The barmaid scratches her pen on the pad. “And to drink?”

“We’re fine, I think,” Eve says, “Oh, hang on, though.” She tips up her glass, and the red vanishes to the back of her throat. “One more, please. And a jug of water, if I may.” She smiles, waiting for her to leave.

I’m not sure what to talk about, and I fidget. The fire is suddenly too warm, and the room spins. “I don’t feel great.” I say.

“You do look a touch pale.”

I reach for the window next to me, and try to manoeuvre the catch to let some air in. It’s jammed. Damn thing. I give up, and meet her eye.

She talks, as the barmaid brings her wine. “So, tell me about yourself. Not that garbage on your profile. What life really means to you.”

I lean my elbows on the table. “Well, I was brought up here. In the village. Lived on the farm all my life, inherited it young.”

“Did you never want to leave? To travel?”

I shrug. “Nah. Well, maybe…when I was a teenager.” I stop, not wanting to remember. “Before then, though, when I was a kid – living here was heaven. All that moorland, the rivers to muck about in. I love it. Not just the fields and the farm, but the Moor itself. It’s part of me.” I break off, embarrassed. 

“It is gorgeous up here, you’re right.” 

“And whereabouts are you from?”

She smiles. “Funny you should ask. I lived in this village, for a bit, when I was young.”

“Really?” I shuffle my cutlery to one side. I lean closer, staring. “When? I mean, if you’re the same age as me …” 

“Would have been about seven or so.”

I stare at her. Trying to figure it out. Trying to place her. The school’s tiny, and back then it was even tinier. 

“Evelyn? From Miss Taylor’s class?”
I look at her dark curls, smell woodsmoke from the fire, and grip the edge of the table with hands that are white at the knuckle.

I blink, and in my head we’re out there, up on the moors, after school. I’m a boy in short trousers and my hands are black with peat-mud. Evelyn had persuaded me to dam the stream, and she stood in the middle of the water, her red gingham school dress tucked into her knickers, a devil-may-care attitude on her face. I finished, and smile at her, triumphant. The water pooled at her feet and deepened, puddling and trickling at the edges.

“That’s done it.” I smacked pebbles into the gaps, shoved in handfuls of gritty mud. “Water won’t break through this.” 

She laughed, and the water bulged and trickled over the dam. “It’s going anyway, Johnnie. Let’s smash it.”

We’d kicked down the damn then whooped with laughter as the water rushed away downstream, running clear. A skylark called, singing her high-pitched tune. We’d paid no mind.

“What’re we doing next, Evelyn?” I had to ask, every time. And every time it was the same answer.

“Gonna go find the faeries.” She’d leapt out of the water and ran barefoot up the hillside, skipping ahead, her dark hair dancing in the wind. I grabbed her sandals and scrambled after her.

We made it to the top of Rough Tor and I handed her sandals back. We searched among the stones and bushes. 

“It won’t be much,” she said, “Just a little sign. A clump of grass tied in a knot. Stones in a ring. Something like that.”

“Like this?” I squinted at a tumbled cluster of sheep droppings, tried to pretend I knew what she meant.

“Oh, Johnny. You are funny. That’s poo. Not faery-stuff. You’re not looking hard enough.”

At tea-time, my stomach had grumbled, and I’d persuaded her homeward.

I look at the woman opposite me, trying to fit her face to that girl with flyaway hair and a vivid imagination. I frown. Evelyn had moved out of the village mid-way through primary school and my heart had ached with sadness. The other boys were into football; the girls into Barbie princesses. No-one wanted to search on the high moors for faery rings like my friend Evelyn.

She smiles at me, leans forward across the table and I smell her perfume, sharp and sweet. “Do you remember me, Johnny?”

“You knew! You knew, and made me guess!”

“All part of the game, Johnny. All part of the game.”

She has the same eyes. The same hair, if I look closely. 

“I didn’t recognise you, Evelyn. Or are you Eve, now?”

“Well…”

“So? What happened, where did you end up?”

“Oh, we travelled all over, when I was a kid. Then…I had a partner, and a little boy. Went back to college, when we split up. Studied history at Exeter, then a masters in mythology.”

I shake my head. She’s bound to be out of my league. I was never one for the books, myself. “You always were too clever for me. All I am is a farmer. Always was going to be.”

“Nothing wrong with that. You’re grounded. Safe, I mean. You knew where you were going to stay, and you’re right here.”

Her eyes flick to the door behind me and it closes after someone. She tightens her lips and there’s a flicker of recognition in her eyes. I turn my head. A young man in jeans and tee-shirt has walked into the pub. He’s rubbing his eyes as if he’s been out at a rock concert, and he’s only just woken up. 

Her voice lowers. “Look Johnny, it’s complicated, this. My son…I haven’t seen him for a long time. I miss him, you know?”

She startles at the sound of a footstep next to the table. It’s the barmaid with our meals and the food steams on the plates. I unwrap my knife and fork, slowly.

“Any ketchup, or sauces at all?” The woman hesitates.

I shake my head. I want to talk to Eve, learn more about her. Where she’d lived, what she’d been up to, exactly what she’d been studying. My mouth salivates and I breathe in the steam of my steak and ale pie.

Eve’s eyes flash at me as I stab into the golden crust. “Don’t! For God’s sake, don’t eat it!”

The barmaid waits, smiling. Her elfin face looks down at us and I fancy her cruel, suddenly. She waits, like a hungry raven watching baby birds in a nest.

“Eve. You okay? It’s just steak and ale pie.”

“Don’t touch it. Please. It’s a trick.”

I look up. The fire flickers bright green in the grate. Burns down, then flares high, as if snatched by a gust of wind. The people in the room are statue-still, stuck at their tables with cutlery poised in the air like weapons. I gasp for breath, and smell spring wildflowers. Am I having a stroke? Is this it – the end? Too much excitement for a middle-aged man?

“Eve. Evelyn?”

She stares over my shoulder, then straight at the barmaid, as if she knows her, too. She’s cross, or upset, or both. “You tricked me. You said you wouldn’t. You promised.”

The woman smiles gracefully like an apologetic politician. She speaks, and my ears tingle. Now, her voice is silver bells, whistles and flutes, sharp and fine as linnet-song. I clamp my hands over my ears, but I still hear her, as if she’s speaking in my head.

“I never play fair, mortal ones. You should know that, you of all people. And this is so much more fun. Now, look who’s here to join us for dinner.”

Eve waves, frantically, at the person behind me.

“Mum?” The young man’s voice echoes, concerned. “Mum? You alright?”

She stands, knocking her glass over. Red wine splotches her flowered dress. 

“Get out, James,” she says, then switches to a low persuasive tone, “It’s only a dream, love. Don’t stay here. Just go right out that door and you’ll wake up. It’ll all be fine in the morning.”

“Mum?” He says again, but it’s confused this time, and the door slams shut after he leaves. 

Eve stays upright, face-to-face with the strange woman. “You’ve had your game – I’ve seen my son. Now let this one go. Please, your majesty.”

“Oh, my Evelyn. You know the rules, better than I.” She shakes her head, and there’s that scent of flowers again. Night-scented stock, it is. I recognise it from the kitchen garden, back home.

 The woman laughs, and viridescent fire dances around the logs in the grate, and I think I hear pixie-song.

My date stands up for me. “He hasn’t. I swear he hasn’t touched it.”

I look down at my pie. The fork drops from my fingertips.

“Evelyn?” I say. “Where exactly are we? And what happens if I eat this?”
She leans forward, sweeping my meal onto the flagstones of the floor. The plate smashes into shards of white china on the dark slate and the pie-dish sings out a high note. The other diners stay stock-still. If this is a dream – and perhaps it is – then I’m stuck inside of it. With my old friend Evelyn, who I haven’t seen for thirty-five years.

Evelyn looks down, embarrassed. “Well, Johnnie, it’s like this. I had a research project I was working on. Finding evidence. Of ancient myths. And …faeries. It went wrong. I went too far.”

Fear shoots a bolt into my heart. “Who are you?” I ask the green-eyed woman, and I know the answer already.

She laughs, and her eyes are cruel. “I’m the Queen of Fey. You’re mine, like the other one there. Mine until the end of time. If any sustenance reaches your lips, I’ve won you.”

“But he didn’t….” Evelyn’s eyes stop at my pint, sitting on the table in front of me. It’s only four-fifths full.

“Oh yes. Oh yes he did.” She points, and my stomach twists a fresh somersault. I glance sideways at the table, like a naughty schoolboy.

“Hang on, ma’am.” I push back the chair and its oak legs scrape against the stones. The sound pulls me back, and my head clears as if I’ve taken a breath of fresh moorland air. “Just you hang on.” 

I stand taller than her and I hold myself strong, staring her down.

“I’m a farmer from Blisland and I called for protection from the Stone before I came here. You’ve got nothing on me. Look at the table.” 

Both women stare down at the varnished wood.

There’s a mucky puddle of slopped beer around my glass.

“I spilt it. Not like me to chuck good ale around, but I was nervous.”

Evelyn’s eyes widen.

I seize the moment, and reach for her hand. It’s soft, and warm, and for a moment I’m back in my childhood. 

The barmaid, or queen, or whoever she thinks she is, narrows her eyes. 

I haul Evelyn towards me. “We’re leaving.” 

She reaches out for Evelyn and her voice turns to rock. “She’s mine.”

“Not any more,” I say, and dash for the door, holding my date’s hand fast.

I push open the oak door and a burst of fresh air hits my face. My legs feel stronger, now I’m away from that infernal warmth and that strange fire. I breathe in deep and look at Evelyn. Her face is excited and fearful, all at once. There’s a howl of rage from inside the pub, and the sound of a solid table crashing onto the floor.

“Time to head home to the farm. The Stone’s on the way.” 

Tears brim in her eyes. “Am I safe? Am I?”

I look around me at the clear autumn air, and the sprinkling of stars, all in the same places as earlier. A blackbird flits across the green and the sounds fade to the simplicity of a calm night. 

“Yes. We’re back. And she can’t interfere, if I’ve touched the Stone. I always do. No-one can take a Blisland man.”

She smiles, and leans on my shoulder, puffing out a breath of air. “I hoped you hadn’t changed. And you haven’t, Johnnie. Let’s go home.”

Jo grew up here in the town of Lostwithiel. Whenever we visit her parents, our two children repeat what they’ve heard. Lost within the hills, they say, is where we’re going.

A small town in the hills, either side of a tidal river. The river is sometimes just a few metres across, sometimes much wider. It has a bridge that is more than 700 years old. At low tide, the river flows through four of the six arches. At high tide, it flows through five. Two or three times a year, or when it floods, the river flows through all six arches. Last year, it flowed right over the bridge and into the riverside houses.

We come here from London in the holidays and spend a few nights with Jo’s parents, and in summer months the children play in the river, as they do this hot afternoon. It’s mid-tide, the river flowing through four and a half arches. The rough sandy-stone bottom of the fifth arch is only half submerged, and our children walk along the dry part under the bridge.

I can’t see them now but they’re old enough, seven and ten, to play together on their own for a minute. Bella and Ben, their brown curls always tangled. I exhale and lay back on the grassy bank, eyes closed, sun warm on my face. Water laps softly at the rivershore, birds and children do their chattering, small stones dig into my back.

It was just a few seconds I think, as I sit up, that I’d dozed, realising that I must have been dreaming the leeches sucking blood out my legs. I brush my hands over my legs at nothing there. And realise a silence, only the soft sound of the water this still day. I stand up and jump down the bank, following the way the children went a moment or so ago. There’s only a thin strip of sand now and my feet get wet as I bend my way through the fifth arch. But I see no children on this other side of the bridge either, just the river, with its little mud-stone beaches. I shout their names, and the sound seems to ripple the water. I look back through the arch at the grassy bank, at nobody there either. I walk a little further upriver and shout again. I call Jo’s phone in what I now suspect is still a dream, hearing my voice say things like I can’t find the children, they went under the bridge and they’re gone. I look up at the hills that rise from either side of the river and wonder if they’re getting lost within them. I look ahead at the trees that gather more thickly further upriver until they become forest. I look into the water and see no signs, no splashes or body parts, not even a ripple now—nothing but a duck with a fish in its beak, a fish too large for it to eat.

The tide is high now. The river runs fully through all five arches.

I climb up the bank and look into the river from there. Still nothing. The water is clear today; they’d be visible even if they were underwater. I start walking along the bank, toward the trees. Until now I have felt too calm, as though nothing is real. Now I feel a flutter of something between panic and sorrow, something between searching frantically screaming their names and sitting on the ground to sob. I keep it all at bay and continue walking, calling for them every ten seconds or so. I hear Jo’s shouts now as she has found her way to the river, and I shout back at her. People start gathering round, and I run back to her. Russell is among them, a retired policeman who lives on the corner of Jo’s parents’ street. Small town busybody, I’m thinking, as he stands there with his hands in his blue jeans pockets. And sure enough, here’s old farmer Jago walking over, has to be in on everything, and suddenly I hate this parochial place. Luckily Jo is here to tell them calmly how we’ve lost our children—they’ve probably just got caught up in their game, she adds. Has anyone seen them: two messy brown-haired children wearing just shorts? A woman with her dog offers to walk up the back streets to look for them, and Russell and Jago offer to walk further downriver, taking any opportunity for a gossip. We decide to call the police in five minutes if there’s no sign.

Jo and I continue again upriver, where we sense they’d have wanted to go, where there’s the woods and a little clearing to the left up ahead, where a massive old tree is fallen, its roots exposed. They climbed all over that tree last summer, grazing their knees on its growling bark. They’re not climbing on it now. There’s just the ivy growing over it, a single bee crawling, looking tired. We stand there for a moment, watching the bee. 

A slight breeze sends a chill through me, setting me off again towards the thicker trees, the beginning of the forest, Jo following close behind. As I enter the shadows a hint of smoke catches in my nose. D’you smell that, Jo asks, and we’re pushing through the undergrowth, the smell growing into our lungs as brambles scratch our legs and arms—even Jo’s cheek has gained a neat red line when I glance back at her, with a smudge of blood across her nose. We press on, stamping down the brambles, hacking against them with branch-sticks before we see another clearing in the shade, an area of sunlight. We barge on toward the light, until we burst out into it.

They are here, our two children, sat next to a small fire, eating fish. They don’t see us straight away. The noise of the fire and their eating of fish keep their attention away from our entrance on the other side of the clearing. We stand there for a second, staring. We look around, and it’s just them, alone, with a side of trout each on a white dinner plate, picking at it awkwardly with a fork and putting flakes into their mouths. On the fire is a wire mesh on which the trout must have cooked. On the floor is a silver spatula that must have been used to lift the trout off onto the dinner plates. Astonished and suddenly furious, I shout at them what on earth are they doing, why did they leave the river, why didn’t they tell me where they were going.

A woman wearing a deep brown hijab appears, and it is then I see a tent edging half in and out the trees. She’s staying in the tent, I guess, or living in it. She looks at us, says hello. What’s she doing here? We’ve got to get the children back to the river, I tell her, everyone is looking for them. Come on, I say to Jo, grabbing one of each child’s hands and pulling them away, back into the trees, looking back and saying thank you, I guess for the fish.

As we approach the river again we see Russell and Jago and the dog-walking woman are gathered back together, cheering as they see the children with us. They got lost in the woods, we explain. Now they are found. The river is still high, flowing through the five arches.

Mum, our youngest starts, looking up at me as we walk back up the hill to Jo’s parents’ house, still in a daze. Mama, she says, looking at Jo: I didn’t want the fish to start with, but actually it was tasty. Jo asks her again what happened, and this time Bella tells us they’d just gone a little way into the trees by themselves where they were playing with the piskies, and then they were lost. The way they thought went back to the river was just more and more trees. Then the woman had come, and showed them the way to where the sweet berries grow. She’d taken their hands and the children followed her because they didn’t know what other way to go. And the woman led them in further, until she sat them down next to the fire and put the fish on the fire and one minute later gave them the fish.

You should never go off with strangers, you know that, Jo says to them. They tell us she isn’t a stranger, we’ve seen her before. I don’t believe them, but I’m glad they’re found and we’re coming to Jo’s parents’ house, so I leave it.

Later, Jo tells me she wants to take some food to the woman, see if she needs anything. I tell her she should stay away. But Jo goes anyway, taking apples, carrots and hazelnuts. I run after her to catch up, leaving the children with Jo’s parents, shouting back that we won’t be long. Jo takes my hand and we walk down the hill together, over the bridge with the river fallen to four arches, and retrace the way through the trees. The shadows are longer now. As we get to the clearing, we hear voices and slow down. We peer through the trees, and see more than the woman: there’s about six adults in the shadows, and three children. Jo steps out, offering the food. I creep behind her. The woman sees us and smiles, starts thanking us and offering a place around the fire, and as we stand there hesitating about getting back to our children we’re amazed to see Russell walk in another way through the trees.

What are you doing here, Jo and Russell ask each other the same. Jo says we brought food; Russell says he’s been coming from time to time, since the group arrived. He asks us to please never breathe a word. Not even to Jo’s parents, because just one person will tell just one person until the wrong person knows. We promise, and he sits us down. He tells us slowly now, about how he’s part of a network stretching to the coast, consisting of a bunch of nosy old busybodies who pretend to be a bunch of nosy old busybodies but who secretly assist people who come to shore. This group in the trees had come halfway upriver one night, on a small fishing boat on a high spring tide. Russell’s friends had loaned them four canoes to help them travel further upriver. They paddled under the bridge of a crescent moon, when the river flowed through all six arches. They’re living here in the woods, for now.

Old farmer Jago is in on it too, he tells us as the sun sparkles low in the leaves. He shows us the two wooden huts they’re building for the coming winter. But he’s a right-wing anti-immigrant GB News watcher, I say, remembering the winter evening we’d seen it flickering through his open curtains. I wonder now if that’s part of his disguise.

These people from afar, they give us fish by their fire and show us the real meaning of Lostwithiel. It doesn’t mean lost within the hills, not at all. It derives from the old Cornish word Lostgwydeyel, so they heard. Lostgwydeyel means the place at the tail of the woodland. The woodland has a tail, because it is a living being. Up here in the woods, is the heart.